Egyptian mummies yield genetic secrets
Next-generation sequencing finds DNA preserved in hot climates.
Showing posts with label mummies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mummies. Show all posts
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Thursday, June 7, 2012
"Ring of Babies" Buried in Peruvian Tomb
From The National Geographic
A totally misleading headline:
The adult dead in the newfound tomb were found in the fetal position, which may have represented "some kind of rebirth" to the Ychsma, excavation leader Eeckhout said.
About half the bodies in the tomb belonged to babies—signaling either ritual sacrifice or that they'd "died from natural causes and then were deposited in some place until the moment of the foundation of that tomb," Eeckhout said.
Physical evidence of sacrifice, he added, may be hard to spot on the tiny corpses, particularly in cases of suffocation. Signs of sacrifice have been found in the past on very well preserved Pachacamac infant remains, he added. "But in this case it is absolutely not sure."
There's no doubt, though, that animals were sacrificed, Eeckhout said. Guinea pigs appear to have been the favored offerings, but dogs and parts of llamas or alpacas have also been recovered from the tomb.
So, even though they ABSOLUTELY are not sure, the caption to the photo still reads "Mummy bundles, child sacrifices found on pyramid." Nice disclaimer, dudes.
Article about the ongoing excavations at Pachacamac.
A totally misleading headline:
Pictures: Huge Peru Tomb Found—80 Bodies, Ring of Babies
Bundled Bodies
Photograph courtesy Université libre de Bruxelles
About half the bodies in the tomb belonged to babies—signaling either ritual sacrifice or that they'd "died from natural causes and then were deposited in some place until the moment of the foundation of that tomb," Eeckhout said.
Physical evidence of sacrifice, he added, may be hard to spot on the tiny corpses, particularly in cases of suffocation. Signs of sacrifice have been found in the past on very well preserved Pachacamac infant remains, he added. "But in this case it is absolutely not sure."
There's no doubt, though, that animals were sacrificed, Eeckhout said. Guinea pigs appear to have been the favored offerings, but dogs and parts of llamas or alpacas have also been recovered from the tomb.
So, even though they ABSOLUTELY are not sure, the caption to the photo still reads "Mummy bundles, child sacrifices found on pyramid." Nice disclaimer, dudes.
Article about the ongoing excavations at Pachacamac.
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
The Silk Road Exhibit is ON in Philadelphia!
Sorry for not having reported on this sooner. The article is from February 20th. I am pleased and happy to report that the Chinese government decided, at the last moment, to allow the mummies from Urumchi and elsewhere to go on exhibit, after all, in Philadelphia. You will recall that the exhibit of the mummies and many other artifacts was cancelled/prohibited by the Chinese government after months of preparation went into the event and after having been exhibited elsewhere in the United States! No explanation was every given for this unbelievable act. Perhaps they expected no one would notice or complain? But unlike in China, where there is censorship and Big Brother spies everywhere, people in this country and our press are still free (although at times it doesn't seem like it, heh?) Perhaps all the outrage poured forth on hundreds of blogs and in newspaper articles in all of the major papers changed someone's mind? Who knows. The artifacts are on view through March 28 at the Penn Museum, 3260 South Street, Philadelphia; (215) 898-4000, penn.museum.
Exhibition Review
Another Stop on a Long, Improbable Journey
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: February 20, 2011
PHILADELPHIA — There are times, at the Penn Museum here, when you are almost hesitant to breathe. And it has nothing to do with the recent flurry of events in which Chinese officials suddenly forbid the display of the remarkable objects in the exhibition “Secrets of the Silk Road,” ultimately relenting and allowing them to be shown for just a short time. These doings (about which more later) are scarcely blinks in the history of these objects.
Most of these astonishing artifacts should have ceased to exist long ago. Exposed to breath and light, you can imagine them disintegrating into powdery mist: silk pillows and robes, thin brocades of cloth with floral patterns and rich colors, woven baskets, felt hats, a braided fried dough twist, feathers from caps and arrows. Ephemera, surely: these are not lasting things of stone, bone and gold, and the newest are at least 1,000 years old.
And speaking of ephemera, what of the bundled infant, whose light-brown hair can be seen peeking out of a blue cashmere cap? It is wrapped in a wool cloth tied with thick cords of red and blue. Two rectangular blue stones rest over its eyes, and at its side is a prehistoric nursing bottle made from a goat’s bladder. The baby’s age? Less than 10 months, or, reckoning from its death, 28 centuries.
In another part of this 6,000-square-foot exhibition lies the body of a woman wrapped in a wool cloak, her lavish brown hair draped to the side of her face, long lashes still framing her sunken eyes. Her skin, tinged with a white coating is eerily sensuous. That must have been a cold winter: she is still wearing fur-lined leather boots. She is in her early 40s, we are told, though that was at least 3,500 years ago. The Beauty of Xiaohe she’s called, and we forgive the poetic liberty, because in her death, against all the cautionary chastisements of later centuries, even that ephemeral aesthetic property remains intact.
These artifacts and bodies have all been uncovered from under the inhospitable sands of the Tarim Basin in the far western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, where the seasonal temperatures range from 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit to 104 degrees above. Bodies seem to have been preserved not by design — the way the ancient Egyptians prepared for the afterlife — but accidentally. When buried during the winters, in tightly sealed coffins, many corpses were preserved from the indignities of decay by mineral salts and dry weather. The harshness of that environment is in sharp contrast to the almost genteel delicacy of the objects discovered there in recent decades in ancient cemeteries.
But the extremes may be in keeping with the political environment that led to recent controversies. The two mummies (on view until March 15) and the artifacts on loan from China (on view until March 28), are part of an exhibition organized by the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif., that opened there a year ago; it also traveled to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Victor Mair, a leading scholar of these artifacts and a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, is editor of the informative exhibition catalog and has served as a consultant, shaping the show for the Penn Museum (formally known as the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology).
This, the show’s final stop, was to last from Feb. 5 through June 5. Special timed tickets were sold, events and lectures planned. The exhibition was expected to elevate the income and stature of this already distinguished museum.
Just days before the opening, though, the Chinese government announced that no objects could be shown at all, even though they had already been displayed in Santa Ana and Houston. No explanations were offered, and no museum official would comment. Photographs were substituted for the missing items and admission prices eliminated. One museum spokesman attributed the problem to a “miscommunication” and would not elaborate. Then, last week, negotiations led to the abbreviated schedule.
Look around and you can begin to see why these artifacts might have more than a purely anthropological or aesthetic importance. It would be foolhardy to think that they reflect a single culture. The Tarim Basin is a sixth the size of China and nearly the size of Western Europe; artifacts here range over thousands of years from multiple sites.
Moreover the exhibition’s title is too narrow. The Silk Road, a network of trading routes that crossed the Basin region, was in its prime during the first millennium. These artifacts reach back to the Bronze Age. Sometime between 1800 B.C. and 1500 B.C., the Beauty of Xiahoe was buried. Would she have had any familiarity with the uncannily well-preserved pastries shown here that have a freshness date of sometime in the ninth century? A lot happens in 2,500 years.
In addition the exhibition text points out that even before the height of the Silk Road the basin was a multicultural area. Records of 28 different languages have been found there, including Tocharian, unique to the region. Buddhism was practiced (as several artifacts show); so were Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Judaism. Conquests by Islam and by Genghis Khan’s armies led to still other transformations.
Exhibition Review
Another Stop on a Long, Improbable JourneyPublished: February 20, 2011
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In addition the exhibition text points out that even before the height of the Silk Road the basin was a multicultural area. Records of 28 different languages have been found there, including Tocharian, unique to the region. Buddhism was practiced (as several artifacts show); so were Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Judaism. Conquests by Islam and by Genghis Khan’s armies led to still other transformations.
Multimedia
Slide Show ‘Secrets of the Silk Road’.Blog
ArtsBeat
The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.
More Arts News
.One of the most remarkable sets of artifacts are the trappings of a man found at Yingpan, dating from the third to the fifth century. His mummy was too fragile to travel, but his clothes are arrayed in a coffinlike space and reflected in a tilted mirror. He was 6 feet 6 inches tall and buried with a Roman glass bowl that might have come from Syria. The pillow he rests on, we are told, shows the influence of Han Chinese culture, but his elaborately decorated clothes include images from Greek and Roman mythology. The hypothesis is that he was a Sogdian trader from the eastern region of Iran. His features do not have any affinity to those of Eastern Asia.
This is the crux of the matter, for most bodies found in this region have what are called Caucasoid features. And though many objects here are clearly associated with later Chinese traditions — like the delicate figurines of women making pottery (from the seventh to ninth centuries) — others come from cultural worlds that can still not be clearly identified.
A felt hat from the fifth to third centuries B.C. could easily be imagined atop the head of a Tarim leprechaun. (The exhibition notes that some textile patterns seem related to Celtic styles.)
The Beauty of Xiaohe mummy not only has features that seem alien to the region, but she was also buried in a style that has little connection with local traditions of later millenniums. The wooden coffins in her cemetery are shaped like overturned boats and sealed with clay and mud; women seem to have been buried with icons representing the phallus, men with icons of the vulva. (That cemetery is near a dried up riverbed, which may help account for the boatlike coffins and the ready use of wood in burial artifacts.)
As Mr. Mair points out, the basin, because of its geographic isolation and brutal climate, was one of the last areas on the planet settled by humans. It also proved, he says in the catalog, to be an “unparalleled storehouse of genetic, anthropological and cultural material of peoples who entered it from all directions at different times during the last four millenniums.” Recent genetic research on DNA samples also suggests that there was far more migration of populations than was once thought in the era before the Silk Road.
The problem is that right now this is the worst possible news, given the political climate. There are hints in the catalog of problems Western scholars have confronted: incomplete skeletal remains, unreleased photographs, difficulty in conducting genetic analysis. The unexpected appearance of non-Chinese-seeming cultures and bodies in this region is being treated a bit like the way some American Indian tribes treated the 1996 discovery of Kennewick Man in Washington State, his prehistoric remains showing Caucasoid or Asian features; the tribes asserted ownership over the remains and wanted to prevent scientific analysis.
In this case the issues have ramifications in territorial claims on this oil-rich region. One museum in Xinjiang insists that the territory “has been an inalienable part of the territory of China.” But in 1993 the Chinese government was concerned enough to prevent Mr. Mair from leaving China with 52 tissue samples after having authorized him to go to Xinjiang and collect them. And the region’s Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, have hailed the discovery of these non-East Asian mummies as proof of their own historical claims. There is a separatist movement of Uighurs; there are also Chinese attempts to rein in Islam in the region.
But the DNA and cultural analysis support neither opposing claim. (Nor would it matter if they did.) In a helpful essay in the current issue of the Penn Museum’s magazine Mr. Mair points out that xinjiang means “new borders.” That’s what were established in the region when it was conquered by the Chinese in the 19th century and what were created again, when, after an era of independence, Chinese control was reasserted in the 20th century, turning it into an “autonomous region.”
In the catalog Lothar von Falkenhausen, an art historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggests, “The present exhibition, for reasons connected with the historical situation of Xinjiang today, particularly emphasizes the Chinese cultural impact on the ‘Western Regions.’ ” Maybe Mr. Mair’s particular emphasis on cosmopolitan themes made the Chinese particularly nervous, but other visitors, can only react with something like awe at how much there is still to learn from what is buried in the sands, and what an enduring impact ephemera can have.
Exhibition Review
Another Stop on a Long, Improbable Journey
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: February 20, 2011
PHILADELPHIA — There are times, at the Penn Museum here, when you are almost hesitant to breathe. And it has nothing to do with the recent flurry of events in which Chinese officials suddenly forbid the display of the remarkable objects in the exhibition “Secrets of the Silk Road,” ultimately relenting and allowing them to be shown for just a short time. These doings (about which more later) are scarcely blinks in the history of these objects.
Most of these astonishing artifacts should have ceased to exist long ago. Exposed to breath and light, you can imagine them disintegrating into powdery mist: silk pillows and robes, thin brocades of cloth with floral patterns and rich colors, woven baskets, felt hats, a braided fried dough twist, feathers from caps and arrows. Ephemera, surely: these are not lasting things of stone, bone and gold, and the newest are at least 1,000 years old.
And speaking of ephemera, what of the bundled infant, whose light-brown hair can be seen peeking out of a blue cashmere cap? It is wrapped in a wool cloth tied with thick cords of red and blue. Two rectangular blue stones rest over its eyes, and at its side is a prehistoric nursing bottle made from a goat’s bladder. The baby’s age? Less than 10 months, or, reckoning from its death, 28 centuries.
In another part of this 6,000-square-foot exhibition lies the body of a woman wrapped in a wool cloak, her lavish brown hair draped to the side of her face, long lashes still framing her sunken eyes. Her skin, tinged with a white coating is eerily sensuous. That must have been a cold winter: she is still wearing fur-lined leather boots. She is in her early 40s, we are told, though that was at least 3,500 years ago. The Beauty of Xiaohe she’s called, and we forgive the poetic liberty, because in her death, against all the cautionary chastisements of later centuries, even that ephemeral aesthetic property remains intact.
These artifacts and bodies have all been uncovered from under the inhospitable sands of the Tarim Basin in the far western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, where the seasonal temperatures range from 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit to 104 degrees above. Bodies seem to have been preserved not by design — the way the ancient Egyptians prepared for the afterlife — but accidentally. When buried during the winters, in tightly sealed coffins, many corpses were preserved from the indignities of decay by mineral salts and dry weather. The harshness of that environment is in sharp contrast to the almost genteel delicacy of the objects discovered there in recent decades in ancient cemeteries.
But the extremes may be in keeping with the political environment that led to recent controversies. The two mummies (on view until March 15) and the artifacts on loan from China (on view until March 28), are part of an exhibition organized by the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif., that opened there a year ago; it also traveled to the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Victor Mair, a leading scholar of these artifacts and a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, is editor of the informative exhibition catalog and has served as a consultant, shaping the show for the Penn Museum (formally known as the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology).
This, the show’s final stop, was to last from Feb. 5 through June 5. Special timed tickets were sold, events and lectures planned. The exhibition was expected to elevate the income and stature of this already distinguished museum.
Just days before the opening, though, the Chinese government announced that no objects could be shown at all, even though they had already been displayed in Santa Ana and Houston. No explanations were offered, and no museum official would comment. Photographs were substituted for the missing items and admission prices eliminated. One museum spokesman attributed the problem to a “miscommunication” and would not elaborate. Then, last week, negotiations led to the abbreviated schedule.
Look around and you can begin to see why these artifacts might have more than a purely anthropological or aesthetic importance. It would be foolhardy to think that they reflect a single culture. The Tarim Basin is a sixth the size of China and nearly the size of Western Europe; artifacts here range over thousands of years from multiple sites.
Moreover the exhibition’s title is too narrow. The Silk Road, a network of trading routes that crossed the Basin region, was in its prime during the first millennium. These artifacts reach back to the Bronze Age. Sometime between 1800 B.C. and 1500 B.C., the Beauty of Xiahoe was buried. Would she have had any familiarity with the uncannily well-preserved pastries shown here that have a freshness date of sometime in the ninth century? A lot happens in 2,500 years.
In addition the exhibition text points out that even before the height of the Silk Road the basin was a multicultural area. Records of 28 different languages have been found there, including Tocharian, unique to the region. Buddhism was practiced (as several artifacts show); so were Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Judaism. Conquests by Islam and by Genghis Khan’s armies led to still other transformations.
Exhibition Review
Another Stop on a Long, Improbable JourneyPublished: February 20, 2011
Recommend
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Single Page
Reprints
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LinkedinDiggMixxMySpacePermalink. (Page 2 of 2)
In addition the exhibition text points out that even before the height of the Silk Road the basin was a multicultural area. Records of 28 different languages have been found there, including Tocharian, unique to the region. Buddhism was practiced (as several artifacts show); so were Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Judaism. Conquests by Islam and by Genghis Khan’s armies led to still other transformations.
Multimedia
Slide Show ‘Secrets of the Silk Road’.Blog
ArtsBeat
The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.
More Arts News
.One of the most remarkable sets of artifacts are the trappings of a man found at Yingpan, dating from the third to the fifth century. His mummy was too fragile to travel, but his clothes are arrayed in a coffinlike space and reflected in a tilted mirror. He was 6 feet 6 inches tall and buried with a Roman glass bowl that might have come from Syria. The pillow he rests on, we are told, shows the influence of Han Chinese culture, but his elaborately decorated clothes include images from Greek and Roman mythology. The hypothesis is that he was a Sogdian trader from the eastern region of Iran. His features do not have any affinity to those of Eastern Asia.
This is the crux of the matter, for most bodies found in this region have what are called Caucasoid features. And though many objects here are clearly associated with later Chinese traditions — like the delicate figurines of women making pottery (from the seventh to ninth centuries) — others come from cultural worlds that can still not be clearly identified.
A felt hat from the fifth to third centuries B.C. could easily be imagined atop the head of a Tarim leprechaun. (The exhibition notes that some textile patterns seem related to Celtic styles.)
The Beauty of Xiaohe mummy not only has features that seem alien to the region, but she was also buried in a style that has little connection with local traditions of later millenniums. The wooden coffins in her cemetery are shaped like overturned boats and sealed with clay and mud; women seem to have been buried with icons representing the phallus, men with icons of the vulva. (That cemetery is near a dried up riverbed, which may help account for the boatlike coffins and the ready use of wood in burial artifacts.)
As Mr. Mair points out, the basin, because of its geographic isolation and brutal climate, was one of the last areas on the planet settled by humans. It also proved, he says in the catalog, to be an “unparalleled storehouse of genetic, anthropological and cultural material of peoples who entered it from all directions at different times during the last four millenniums.” Recent genetic research on DNA samples also suggests that there was far more migration of populations than was once thought in the era before the Silk Road.
The problem is that right now this is the worst possible news, given the political climate. There are hints in the catalog of problems Western scholars have confronted: incomplete skeletal remains, unreleased photographs, difficulty in conducting genetic analysis. The unexpected appearance of non-Chinese-seeming cultures and bodies in this region is being treated a bit like the way some American Indian tribes treated the 1996 discovery of Kennewick Man in Washington State, his prehistoric remains showing Caucasoid or Asian features; the tribes asserted ownership over the remains and wanted to prevent scientific analysis.
In this case the issues have ramifications in territorial claims on this oil-rich region. One museum in Xinjiang insists that the territory “has been an inalienable part of the territory of China.” But in 1993 the Chinese government was concerned enough to prevent Mr. Mair from leaving China with 52 tissue samples after having authorized him to go to Xinjiang and collect them. And the region’s Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people, have hailed the discovery of these non-East Asian mummies as proof of their own historical claims. There is a separatist movement of Uighurs; there are also Chinese attempts to rein in Islam in the region.
But the DNA and cultural analysis support neither opposing claim. (Nor would it matter if they did.) In a helpful essay in the current issue of the Penn Museum’s magazine Mr. Mair points out that xinjiang means “new borders.” That’s what were established in the region when it was conquered by the Chinese in the 19th century and what were created again, when, after an era of independence, Chinese control was reasserted in the 20th century, turning it into an “autonomous region.”
In the catalog Lothar von Falkenhausen, an art historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggests, “The present exhibition, for reasons connected with the historical situation of Xinjiang today, particularly emphasizes the Chinese cultural impact on the ‘Western Regions.’ ” Maybe Mr. Mair’s particular emphasis on cosmopolitan themes made the Chinese particularly nervous, but other visitors, can only react with something like awe at how much there is still to learn from what is buried in the sands, and what an enduring impact ephemera can have.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
China Demands Removal of Artifacts from Silk Road Exhibit...
 |
| The "Beauty of Xiaohe". Image from Penn Current. Buried circa 1800 BCE, one of approximately 500 mummies excavated in the Tarim Basin over the past 40 years. |
Story at Pasthorizons.com
China demands removal of mummies and artifacts from Silk Road exhibition
February 3, 2011
Some possible hints about why the artifacts and mummies were pulled at the last second by the Chinese government (who conveniently turn blind eyes to the concepts of "contract" and "rule of law") may be found in this article at the Los Angeles Times:
China thwarts 'Silk Road' exhibition in Philly -- and Bowers Museum could be out $27,500
February 3, 2011 | 10:38 am
February 2, 2011, 2:54 pm
China Asks Penn to Remove All Artifacts From ‘Silk Road’ Exhibition
By RANDY KENNEDY
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Mummies of the World Exhibit Coming to Milwaukee!
I don't know how I missed this - it was announced back in July, for Goddess' sake! Today I saw an advertisement for the exhibit in the Sunday Journal-Sentinel and nearly fell off my chair. MPM will be the second museum to host this exhibit. I never thought in a million years MPM would bid for such an exhibit. Wow! I wrote about this in March, 2009 and wished then I could see it someday. So, ta da! Here it is!
Here is one of the articles from July announcing the exhibit:
Mummies exhibit coming to Milwaukee Public Museum
Area museum is only the second venue to feature traveling collection
By Jackie Loohauis-Bennett of the Journal Sentinel
July 27, 2010
It begins December 17, 2010. The museum website doesn't say how long the "limited engagement" will run for, though. Drat!
Here is one of the articles from July announcing the exhibit:
Mummies exhibit coming to Milwaukee Public Museum
Area museum is only the second venue to feature traveling collection
By Jackie Loohauis-Bennett of the Journal Sentinel
July 27, 2010
It begins December 17, 2010. The museum website doesn't say how long the "limited engagement" will run for, though. Drat!
Sunday, May 23, 2010
57 Mummies Uncovered from Tombs Near Fayoum, Egypt
From The Washington Post
57 ancient tombs with mummies unearthed in Egypt
The Associated Press
Sunday, May 23, 2010; 11:58 AM
CAIRO -- Archeologists have unearthed 57 ancient Egyptian tombs, most of which hold an ornately painted wooden sarcophagus with a mummy inside, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities said Sunday.
The oldest tombs date back to around 2750 B.C. during the period of Egypt's first and second dynasties, the council said in a statement. Twelve of the tombs belong the 18th dynasty which ruled Egypt during the second millennium B.C.
The discovery throws new light on Egypt's ancient religions, the council said.
Egypt's archaeology chief, Zahi Hawass, said the mummies dating to the 18th dynasty are covered in linen decorated with religious texts from the Book of the Dead and scenes featuring ancient Egyptian deities.
Abdel Rahman El-Aydi, head of the archaeological mission that made the discovery, said some of the tombs are decorated with religious texts that ancient Egyptians believed would help the deceased to cross through the underworld.
El-Aydi said one of the oldest tombs is almost completely intact, with all of its funerary equipment and a wooden sarcophagus containing a mummy wrapped in linen.
In 31 tombs dating to around 2030-1840 B.C, archeologists discovered scenes of different ancient Egyptian deities, such as the falcon-headed Horus, Hathor, Khnum and Amun, decorating some of the tombs.
The council said the findings were unearthed at Lahoun, in Fayoum, some 70 miles (100 kilometers) south of Cairo.
Last year, some 53 stone tombs dating back to various ancient periods were found in the area.
Sunday, March 21, 2010
The Forgotten Boy
Absolutely fascinating recap of the story of the boy mummy from KV 35. By the way - a note to 'Sis - this article suggests some answers to the reasons why some other pharaohs' funerary furniture and belongings ended up in Tutenkhamun's tomb. It's so sad, this little boy without a name.
From the "Egyptians" blog by Timothy Reid, on March 13, 2010:
In the recent two year study of eighteenth dynasty royal mummies it seems that this boy from a side chamber in valley of kings tomb KV 35 was not included.
There are artifacts from the tomb Kv 35 which belong to a son of Amenhotep II named Webensenu as a result of the mummies found in the tomb there are four candidates to be that prince including this boy or another mummy found attached to a funerary boat belonging to Amenhotep II or either of two skeletons.
Some have speculated that the mummy on the boat was the founder of the twentieth dynasty Sethnakht because of a reused coffin once manufactured for that king was present in the tomb at the time of discovery. Unfortunately the mummy was destroyed more than a hundred years ago when the boat was stolen.
Reports on that badly damaged mummy says that it was glued to the boat by resin used in the mummies mummification that would mean that the mummy was fairly fresh when unwrapped and thrown on Amenhotep's boat in ancient times.
The founder of the twentieth dynasty the pharaoh Sethnakht has been suggested as a candidate dying in approximately 1186 bc would have lain in his tomb or at least a tomb for one hundred years before the recycling of the valley of kings by Herihor and Pinudgem I and others. Is this enough time for the resins on Sethnakht's mummy to have set?
Tutankhamen's mummy was covered in buckets of resin if the same had been true for Sethnakht would a century be enough time to set? I suspect in the dry climate of the valley of kings that this may well be enough time.
Whatever happened the mummy was still gooey enough that when torn open in the tomb of Amenhotep II the mummy stuck to the boat. This seems unlikely scenario to me and I would prefer this mummy to be another person perhaps prince Webensenu already buried in Amenhotep II's tomb before the reburial committee of the twenty first dynasty priests arrived.
However that to me would mean that Kv 35 had probably been robbed by the end of the eighteenth dynasty perhaps during the Amarna period with the princes badly damaged mummy thrown on the boat then.
This may remove Sethnakht from ever having been in Kv 35 but he may be represented by one of the unidentified skeletons though I would expect that if Sethnakht was in the tomb that his mummy would have been found in the side chamber with the other new kingdom pharaohs.
So who's the boy found lying between two Amarna period mummies now identified as queen Tiye and the other woman being Tutankhamen's mother? The naked boy may have done some moving around in Kv 35 as one of his toes was found in another side chamber of the tomb.
Rest of article.
From the "Egyptians" blog by Timothy Reid, on March 13, 2010:
There are artifacts from the tomb Kv 35 which belong to a son of Amenhotep II named Webensenu as a result of the mummies found in the tomb there are four candidates to be that prince including this boy or another mummy found attached to a funerary boat belonging to Amenhotep II or either of two skeletons.
Some have speculated that the mummy on the boat was the founder of the twentieth dynasty Sethnakht because of a reused coffin once manufactured for that king was present in the tomb at the time of discovery. Unfortunately the mummy was destroyed more than a hundred years ago when the boat was stolen.
Reports on that badly damaged mummy says that it was glued to the boat by resin used in the mummies mummification that would mean that the mummy was fairly fresh when unwrapped and thrown on Amenhotep's boat in ancient times.
The founder of the twentieth dynasty the pharaoh Sethnakht has been suggested as a candidate dying in approximately 1186 bc would have lain in his tomb or at least a tomb for one hundred years before the recycling of the valley of kings by Herihor and Pinudgem I and others. Is this enough time for the resins on Sethnakht's mummy to have set?
Tutankhamen's mummy was covered in buckets of resin if the same had been true for Sethnakht would a century be enough time to set? I suspect in the dry climate of the valley of kings that this may well be enough time.
Whatever happened the mummy was still gooey enough that when torn open in the tomb of Amenhotep II the mummy stuck to the boat. This seems unlikely scenario to me and I would prefer this mummy to be another person perhaps prince Webensenu already buried in Amenhotep II's tomb before the reburial committee of the twenty first dynasty priests arrived.
However that to me would mean that Kv 35 had probably been robbed by the end of the eighteenth dynasty perhaps during the Amarna period with the princes badly damaged mummy thrown on the boat then.
This may remove Sethnakht from ever having been in Kv 35 but he may be represented by one of the unidentified skeletons though I would expect that if Sethnakht was in the tomb that his mummy would have been found in the side chamber with the other new kingdom pharaohs.
So who's the boy found lying between two Amarna period mummies now identified as queen Tiye and the other woman being Tutankhamen's mother? The naked boy may have done some moving around in Kv 35 as one of his toes was found in another side chamber of the tomb.
Rest of article.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
A Host of Mummies, a Forest of Secrets
The NYT article has an interactive feature over 17 minutes long and photographs, too. Check it out! Text is below.
By NICHOLAS WADE
Published: March 15, 2010
In the middle of a terrifying desert north of Tibet, Chinese archaeologists have excavated an extraordinary cemetery. Its inhabitants died almost 4,000 years ago, yet their bodies have been well preserved by the dry air.
The cemetery lies in what is now China’s northwest autonomous region of Xinjiang, yet the people have European features, with brown hair and long noses. Their remains, though lying in one of the world’s largest deserts, are buried in upside-down boats. And where tombstones might stand, declaring pious hope for some god’s mercy in the afterlife, their cemetery sports instead a vigorous forest of phallic symbols, signaling an intense interest in the pleasures or utility of procreation.
Their graveyard, known as Small River Cemetery No. 5, lies near a dried-up riverbed in the Tarim Basin, a region encircled by forbidding mountain ranges. Most of the basin is occupied by the Taklimakan Desert, a wilderness so inhospitable that later travelers along the Silk Road would edge along its northern or southern borders.
In modern times the region has been occupied by Turkish-speaking Uighurs, joined in the last 50 years by Han settlers from China. Ethnic tensions have recently arisen between the two groups, with riots in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang. A large number of ancient mummies, really desiccated corpses, have emerged from the sands, only to become pawns between the Uighurs and the Han.
The 200 or so mummies have a distinctively Western appearance, and the Uighurs, even though they did not arrive in the region until the 10th century, have cited them to claim that the autonomous region was always theirs. Some of the mummies, including a well-preserved woman known as the Beauty of Loulan, were analyzed by Li Jin, a well-known geneticist at Fudan University, who said in 2007 that their DNA contained markers indicating an East Asian and even South Asian origin.
The mummies in the Small River Cemetery are, so far, the oldest discovered in the Tarim Basin. Carbon tests done at Beijing University show that the oldest part dates to 3,980 years ago. A team of Chinese geneticists has analyzed the mummies’ DNA.
Despite the political tensions over the mummies’ origin, the Chinese said in a report published last month in the journal BMC Biology that the people were of mixed ancestry, having both European and some Siberian genetic markers, and probably came from outside China. The team was led by Hui Zhou of Jilin University in Changchun, with Dr. Jin as a co-author.
All the men who were analyzed had a Y chromosome that is now mostly found in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Siberia, but rarely in China. The mitochondrial DNA, which passes down the female line, consisted of a lineage from Siberia and two that are common in Europe. Since both the Y chromosome and the mitochondrial DNA lineages are ancient, Dr. Zhou and his team conclude the European and Siberian populations probably intermarried before entering the Tarim Basin some 4,000 years ago.
The Small River Cemetery was rediscovered in 1934 by the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman and then forgotten for 66 years until relocated through GPS navigation by a Chinese expedition. Archaeologists began excavating it from 2003 to 2005. Their reports have been translated and summarized by Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in the prehistory of the Tarim Basin.
As the Chinese archaeologists dug through the five layers of burials, Dr. Mair recounted, they came across almost 200 poles, each 13 feet tall. Many had flat blades, painted black and red, like the oars from some great galley that had foundered beneath the waves of sand.
At the foot of each pole there were indeed boats, laid upside down and covered with cowhide. The bodies inside the boats were still wearing the clothes they had been buried in. They had felt caps with feathers tucked in the brim, uncannily resembling Tyrolean mountain hats. They wore large woolen capes with tassels and leather boots. A Bronze Age salesclerk from Victoria’s Secret seems to have supplied the clothes beneath — barely adequate woolen loin cloths for the men, and skirts made of string strands for the women.
Within each boat coffin were grave goods, including beautifully woven grass baskets, skillfully carved masks and bundles of ephedra, an herb that may have been used in rituals or as a medicine.
In the women’s coffins, the Chinese archaeologists encountered one or more life-size wooden phalluses laid on the body or by its side. Looking again at the shaping of the 13-foot poles that rise from the prow of each woman’s boat, the archaeologists concluded that the poles were in fact gigantic phallic symbols.
The men’s boats, on the other hand, all lay beneath the poles with bladelike tops. These were not the oars they had seemed at first sight, the Chinese archaeologists concluded, but rather symbolic vulvas that matched the opposite sex symbols above the women’s boats. “The whole of the cemetery was blanketed with blatant sexual symbolism,” Dr. Mair wrote. In his view, the “obsession with procreation” reflected the importance the community attached to fertility.
Arthur Wolf, an anthropologist at Stanford University and an expert on fertility in East Asia, said that the poles perhaps mark social status, a common theme of tombs and grave goods. “It seems that what most people want to take with them is their status, if it is anything to brag about,” he said.
Dr. Mair said the Chinese archaeologists’ interpretation of the poles as phallic symbols was “a believable analysis.” The buried people’s evident veneration of procreation could mean they were interested in both the pleasure of sex and its utility, given that it is difficult to separate the two. But they seem to have had particular respect for fertility, Dr. Mair said, because several women were buried in double-layered coffins with special grave goods.
Living in harsh surroundings, “infant mortality must have been high, so the need for procreation, particularly in light of their isolated situation, would have been great,” Dr. Mair said. Another possible risk to fertility could have arisen if the population had become in-bred. “Those women who were able to produce and rear children to adulthood would have been particularly revered,” Dr. Mair said.
Several items in the Small River Cemetery burials resemble artifacts or customs familiar in Europe, Dr. Mair noted. Boat burials were common among the Vikings. String skirts and phallic symbols have been found in Bronze Age burials of Northern Europe.
There are no known settlements near the cemetery, so the people probably lived elsewhere and reached the cemetery by boat. No woodworking tools have been found at the site, supporting the idea that the poles were carved off site.
The Tarim Basin was already quite dry when the Small River people entered it 4,000 years ago. They probably lived at the edge of survival until the lakes and rivers on which they depended finally dried up around A.D. 400. Burials with felt hats and woven baskets were common in the region until some 2,000 years ago.
The language spoken by the people of the Small River Cemetery is unknown, but Dr. Mair believes it could have been Tokharian, an ancient member of the Indo-European family of languages. Manuscripts written in Tokharian have been discovered in the Tarim Basin, where the language was spoken from about A.D. 500 to 900. Despite its presence in the east, Tokharian seems more closely related to the “centum” languages of Europe than to the “satem” languages of India and Iran. The division is based on the words for hundred in Latin (centum) and in Sanskrit (satam).
The Small River Cemetery people lived more than 2,000 years before the earliest evidence for Tokharian, but there is “a clear continuity of culture,” Dr. Mair said, in the form of people being buried with felt hats, a tradition that continued until the first few centuries A.D.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Northwest China Had Bronze Production Early On
We know the area around the Tarim Basin where the world-famous Urumchi mummies and others were discovered might not always have been a desert, because some of the grave yards were surrounded with wooden stockades, and many of the discovered graves were covered with wood. (See book cover, below, showing one such location).In a desert, there would have been no wood. The most obvious answer seems to be that the people who became the mummies were there and were buried before the area became a desert. But then, how did they become mummies? As I understand it, the current theory says that the mummies were naturally dessicated by the sere surroundings. It would have been a process akin to what happened to bodies buried in the sand in pre-dynastic Egypt, before elaborate embalming and mummification rituals were created.
But, a climate that would have supported enough trees to supply the wood necessary to construct the graveyards would imply a climate that was not conducive to the formation of dessicated mummies. So, I am at a loss.You can trace out the ancient northern route of the Silk Road by following the towns: Turpan, Korla, Urumchi, Kuqa, Aksa, Kashgar. Between the northern route and the southern route (which was a killer, with water stops few and far between, but the shorter route), a vast nothingness, quite visible even today on the modern maps.
This article, which presents important information about the early history of bronze smelting in Gansu Province in northwest of China, also indicates that research reveals that the climate once supported trees and farming, and that the people only left after the destruction of all of the trees, when the land turned to desert (I envision a process akin to what caused the Dust Bowl in the 1930's in the USA).
The ancient gateway city of Dunhuang, on the famed Silk Road (c. 200 BCE - 220 CE), which was travelled some 2000 years after the mummies of Urumchi were buried and 3000 years after the Beauty of Loulan was buried, was the last stop for travelers westward to stock up on supplies before venturing forth across the vast horrible stretch of the Taklamakan Desert. It is located on the western border of Ganshu Province.
China had bronze early on
Thursday, 03 December 2009
Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation
ANSTO research has shown that an area of desert in north-western China was once a thriving Bronze Age manufacturing and agricultural site. The new findings may help shed light on the origins and development of the earliest applications of Bronze Age technology.
Dating, using ANSTO’s precision techniques, was used to identify the age of seeds, slag, copper ore and charcoal at two sites. The findings show the material is up to 3700 years old, but that smelting was still being carried out as recently as 1300 years ago.
The research indicates bronze production may have begun as early as 2135 BC and that the modern mine location - Baishantang at Dingxin - was possibly the historical source of copper ore for manufacturing. ANSTO’s Professor John Dodson conducted the research in conjunction with scientists from the State Key Laboratory of Loess and Quaternary Geology in China. A photo of the study site is on the November issue of the journal “Quaternary Research”.
“This research takes us a step closer to discovering the origins and development of bronze manufacturing in China,” said Professor Dodson. “Further research will look at whether bronze technology was invented in several places around the world independently, or whether the technology was transferred from a single centre of origin.”
“The aim of the study was to determine possible sources of ore and evidence of bronze production through analysis of artefacts (with copper and arsenic content) including analysing samples of slag and copper ore from two archaeological sites known as Ganggangwa and Huoshiliang in northwestern Gansu Province,“ he said.
The research used lead and strontium isotopic analysis to identify and age ornaments, knives, rings, hemispherical objects and spearheads.
The team discovered substantial areas of woody vegetation around the sites which is now dominated by sand dunes. The Bronze Age people of the Gansu area were farmers who planted cereals such as wheat and practiced animal husbandry. Horse and sheep bones are common. It is believed they may have abandoned the region when wood was exhausted and desertification took over.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Brooklyn Museum "Unwraps" Four Mummies
Unwrapping Brooklyn's Mummies
July 23, 2009
There is an interview of Edward Bleiberg, curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Middle Eastern Art, and Lisa Burno, Head Objects Conservator, at the website for Archaeology Magazine, about the recent CT scans of four full mummies from the Museum's collection, the results of which yielded some surprises.
dondelion and I spent a day at the Brooklyn Museum during our May visit to New York, after I managed to get past the turnstyle in the subway where we caught the number 2 train that eventually got us to our destination. It has a great collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts - I believe I read that it is the third largest collection in the United States. When we go back to New York again (which I'm sure we will), we'll spend more time there - now that I know the mystery of how to get past the subway turnstyle (hint: the Port Authority should prominently display signs advising left-handed people to swipe their fare card with the right hand!) (Photo: Taken May 17, 2009 by dondelion, a shot of the courtyard at the Brooklyn Museum. It is lined with replicas of classic columns and is used as a teaching tool for field trips of school children.)
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Another Female Sacrifice Found in Peru
Remains of sacrificed woman found in indigenous citadel in Peru
Posted July 14, 2009
From Earthtimes.org
Lima - Archeologists in northern Peru have found the remains of a woman who was apparently killed in a 15th-century sacrifice to calm the wrath of nature. The find was made in Chan Chan, the oldest mud citadel in the Americas, archaeologist Raul Sosaya said Tuesday. The expert said the skeleton corresponded to a woman who was 1.55 metres tall and aged about 17. She died around the year 1460 and belonged to the Chimu culture.
Archaeologists found the body as they were working on the restoration of the outer walls of Chan Chan, around 600 kilometres north of Lima.
Sosaya said that one of the woman's feet had been amputated before she was hanged and her body thrown out near a wall. The gestures on her face suggest that she screamed before she died, and archaeologists think that she was sacrificed.
From what researchers know of the Chimu culture, the amputation of a foot was meant to prevent the sacrificed person from leaving the site in later lives.
"The ancient Chimus conjured themselves to ask that the rain stop. Today we have the evidence of a sacrifice that sought that climate phenomena did not destroy the monument," said Cristobal Campana, the head of the team of archaeologists.
About 40 per cent of the infrastructure of the Chan Chan site turned to mud in 1982-1983, due to rains from the climate phenomenon known as El Nino.
Copyright, respective author or news agency
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How closely connected are the Chimu to the Inca? Are they not connected at all? Was there cross-cultural contact between Chimu and Inca and if so, when did it start and for how long did it continue? Can any comparisons be made between this Chimu sacrifice and the sacrifice of the 33 people, who were mostly female and mostly children and teenagers, who were sacrificed by the Inca that I have posted about previously?
Earthtimes.org article: One 16-17 year old female
July 13, 2009: Follow-up on Those 33 Mummies Found in Peru
June 7, 2009: Gruesome Evidence of Inca Human Sacrifice
Monday, July 13, 2009
Follow-Up on Those 33 Mummies Found in Peru
We already knew this, but this article gives more specifics about the 33 mummies, the majority of which were young females, who were sacrificed.
Peru mummies 'were human sacrifices'
13 July 2009 02:10:00 PM Source: AP/SBS
Utah University professor Haagen Klaus is an expert in bio-archaeology and has been analysing and examining the human remains found in 2007 at the Chotuna Huaca, a site located north east of Chiclayo.
"(The) majority of them were sacrificed using a very sharp bladed instrument, probably a copper or bronze tummy knife. And for the majority there are a several combinations, complex set of variations on cutting of the throat, " Mr Klaus said.
Sacrifices were made "to make sure that there would still be rain and agricultural fertility", Klaus explained.
What made the discovery so unusual in the eyes of the experts was that most of the mummies were females. "The blood sacrifice of a large group of women is something that is very, very unusual, it is the first time we have ever seen this", Mr Klaus said.
In fact, 30 of the 33 bodies were female and according to Klaus they were all very young when they were sacrificed. The majority hadn't reached 15-years-old and some of the mummies were children no older than nine.
Professor Klaus explained that in Andean society children weren't considered human beings. "Children are not human beings because human life comes from mountains.
And when a child is born, a child is likened to a wild uncontrollable mountain spirit," Klaus said. [If this is true, when did a "child" become an "adult" in this culture? One of the sacrificed victims was pregnant, according to an earlier report. Isn't that evidence of being an "adult?"]
In an excellent state of conservation, many still with their hair and teeth intact, the mummies have provided endless study material for Klaus. He was able to extract DNA, learn about the illnesses they had, their diets, their ages, causes of death and even possible kinships among the mummies.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
7,000 Year Old Preserved Children
Cf. Garbage Children?
I am not at all certain that what seems to be the prevailing theory in archaeology and anthropology of "disposable children" is a correct reading of the existing meagre evidence. For instance, there are these lovingly-preserved mummies of children (and some adults, too) that are 7,000 years old - from the New World, no less.
Article at downtoearth.org
Parents’ keepsake
Savvy Soumya Misra
The world’s first mummies: arsenic poisoning victims in Chile in 5000 BC
Article at downtoearth.org
Parents’ keepsake
Savvy Soumya Misra
The world’s first mummies: arsenic poisoning victims in Chile in 5000 BC
(Image: Reuters. A mummified Chinchorro baby in San Miguel Museum in Arica city)
Seven thousand years ago, about 100 km from the contemporary port city of Arica in Chile, a child died. The grieving parents did not want to part with the last remains. They removed the head and internal organs of the child, stuffed it with animal hide, painted a clay model of his head and decorated it with tufts of his hair. The delicately preserved body was excavated in 1983.
Archaeologists believe it is the earliest mummy. More than 100 child mummies were discovered in Camarones near Arica that year. Later, preserved bodies of adults were found as well. Archaeologists say the embalmed bodies were of people from Chile’s Chinchorro community.
Unlike mummies in later civilizations—most notably Egypt that flourished for 2,500 years beginning 3,000 BC—that spun around prestige, wealth and power, Chinchorro mummification was based on a democratic and humanistic view of the dead, and everyone was mummified.
Archaeologist Bernardo Arriaza, who studies the Chinchorro at the University of Tarapaca in Arica, wrote that unlike the Egyptians who hid the dead, the Chilean community embraced them. The child mummies even took their place besides their parents at the dinner table.
A few years ago Arriaza launched a daring new theory: the Chinchorro were victims of arsenic poisoning.
“I was reading a Chilean newspaper that talked about pollution and it had a map of arsenic and lead pollution, and it said arsenic caused abortions. I jumped in my seat and said, That’s it,” Arriaza said.
Following the lead, Arriaza collected 46 hair samples from Chinchorro excavated from 10 sites in northern Chile. Ten samples from the Camarones river valley had an average of 37.8 microgrammes per gramme—much higher than one to 10 microgramme of arsenic per gramme that indicates chronic toxicity according to World Health Organization (who) standards. The sample from an infant’s mummy had a residue of 219 microgramme per gramme.
One theory is that they could have washed their hair with arsenic contaminated water but pathologists explain that washing is unlikely to leave such high levels of arsenic traces.
Arriaza has another explanation. Chinchorros were a fishing society. They collected plants along river mouths and hunted both sea mammals and wild birds. They made fishhooks out of shellfish, bone or cactus needles, spear throwers were used to hunt sea lions and wild camelids, while both lithic points and knives were manufactured using flint stones.
The Chinchorro lacked ceramic vessels, metal objects and woven textiles, but this was not a social handicap: their simple yet efficient fishing technology allowed them to thrive along the Pacific coasts.
But life was not without dangers. In the 1960s tests on water drawn by the city of Antofagasta in the Camarones river valley showed that it was laced with 860 microgrammes of arsenic per litre—86 times higher than the limits acceptable by who. Arriaza believes this was so even 7,000 years ago. Tests on the Chinchorro mummies strengthen the arsenic poisoning theory.
He also believes Chinchorros suffered from chronic ear irritation and impairment probably due to continuous fishing in the Pacific Ocean’s cold waters. They also suffered from parasitic infections from eating poorly cooked fish and sea lion meat.
“In highly stratified societies like ours, lower-class children receive simple or meager mortuary disposal. But in a small group, the death of children certainly threatened the survival of the entire group. Affection and grief may thus have triggered the preservation of children,” the archaeologist said. [Or maybe, just maybe, the parents loved their children and truly mourned their passing, despite what cultural mores today's archaeologists and anthropologists impose upon the ancient peoples they study.]
Chinchorro morticians made incisions to deflesh the body and removed internal organs. Clay, grasses and feathers were used to fill the cavities. The bodies were painted bright red from head to toe, the face was painted black or brown. A long wig up to 60 cm was used to ornament the head. Facial features were modelled to convey life.
[As I understand this article in plain English, the children often died at a very young age because of excess arsenic introduced into their systems via mother's breast milk and contaminated other food and water.]
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Large New Exhibit of Mummies
Mummies collected from around the world - wow, wish I could see this: The Dream of Eternal Life.
From BBC News:
World mummies go on show in Italy
Page last updated at 09:27 GMT, Tuesday, 10 March 2009
One of the biggest exhibitions of mummies ever staged is opening in the northern Italian town of Bolzano.
The show, called the Dream of Eternal Life, features more than 60 mummies from Egypt, Asia, Europe and South America, assembled from 27 museums.
They include animals as well as humans, and the artefacts connected with them.
Among the mummies will be the world-famous 5,300-year-old "Iceman" known as Oetzi, a mummified Neolithic hunter who was unearthed in the Alps in 1991.
Preserved in a specially built refrigerator, Oetzi is known as the oldest "wet mummy" in the world because of the colouration and texture of his skin. He was named after the Oetz Valley where he was discovered by hikers, still wearing goatskin leggings and a grass cape. His copper-headed axe and a quiver full of arrows were lying nearby.
At first, it was thought he died from cold and hunger, but researchers were eventually able to establish that he died from injuries sustained in a conflict.
Like Oetzi, some of the other mummies underwent natural mummification in deserts, peat bogs or ice, while the others were mummified artificially. The world's top palaeontologists will hold a series of lectures to mark the exhibition at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology and talk about the mummies' history and significance.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Big Headlines Today: 30 Mummies Discovered In Egypt
(Some headlines seem to indicate 20 mummies). This was all over the news today:
Egyptian Archaeologists Find 30 Mummies In Saqqara
Posted on: Monday, 9 February 2009, 13:10 CST
The Egyptian government released a statement on Monday saying archaeologists there have found about 30 mummies and at least one unopened sarcophagus in a burial chamber about 4,300 years old.
The chamber was uncovered in the desert on the western side of the Step Pyramid of Saqqara, one of the earliest large stone structures in the world, dating from about 2,650 BC.
Egypt's top archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, said the tomb was located at the bottom of a 36-foot deep shaft where twenty-two mummies were found in niches along the tomb's walls alone.
Hawass' assistant Abdel Hakim Karar said eight sarcophagi were also found in the tomb, although only one has been opened, so far.
The recently discovered mummies appear to range in age. Hawass said one dates from about 640 BC, while the unopened sarcophagus, which is made of limestone and sealed with plaster, is probably much older.
"We think it is Old Kingdom, maybe Fifth Dynasty," Karar told Reuters. The Fifth Dynasty ruled Egypt from about 2,494 BC to 2,345 BC.
He said many of the mummies were poorly preserved and archeologists have yet to find out their identities or how they ended up there. Karar also said it was unusual for mummies of this late period to be stored in rocky niches.
One opened sarcophagus showed the name Badi N Huri engraved into it, but the wooden coffin did not bear a title for the mummy.
"This one might have been an important figure, but I can't tell because there was no title," Karar said.
Archaeologists have excavated tombs in Saqqara for over 150 years, uncovering a necropolis of pyramids and tombs dating mostly from the Old Kingdom.
Hawass said the "storeroom for mummies" dates back to 640 B.C. during the 26th Dynasty, which was Egypt's last independent kingdom before it was overthrown by a succession of foreign conquerors beginning with the Persians.
However, the tomb was discovered at an even older site in Saqqara that dates back to the 4,300-year-old 6th Dynasty.
He added that it was unusual to find intact burials in well-known necropolises such as Saqqara, because grave robbers got to most of the area in ancient times.
Only around 30 percent of Egypt's monuments have been uncovered, with the rest still under the sand, Hawass said.
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So many questions - and no answers! It seems that the original carved tomb dates back to the Old Kingdom's 5th Dynasty, but contained mummies (how many, uncertain at this point) that date to the 26th Dynasty, and possibly the original occupant of the 5th Dynasty tomb in an unopened sarcophogus.
I know that other "storerooms for mummies" have been discovered in Egypt. I don't recall a lot about them - it seems that in times of danger, or in tombs that had been previously ravaged by grave robbers, the often overwhelmed priests periodically gathered mummies and re-interred them. I do not know what rituals, if any, accompanied such reinterrments, but I do know the priesthood was fighting a losing battle. And yet, they continued to battle to preserve the ancient, sacredness of the mummies right up until the time they were finally disbanded by force of sword of Christianity in the early 400s CE. Just a few hundred years later - long enough for the language of the hieroglyphics to be lost - the country was overswept by the Islamists and has been in their control ever since.
I can envision that during this time of danger (the imminent Persian invasion) the priests gathered what mummies they could and put them into a tomb (more likely, several tombs) they thought might be preserved safely, and did their best to cover up their tracks. At least in the case of this tomb uncovered at Saqqara, they were successful, as it was swalled up by the desert sands for the next 2600 years.
Friday, November 28, 2008
Blue Eyed Mummy and Cannabis in Ancient Chinese Grave
I had no idea that most strains of cannabis today originated in China! Fascinating article - and more of those troublesome blue-eyed certainly Caucasian mummies (this one was most likely a shaman) showing up in the far northwest region of China. [Map - shows how close Turpan a/k/a Turfan is to Urumchi a/k/a Urumqi - see prior posts under Mummies of Urumchi: (1) (2)].
Story from The Canadia Press.com
Researchers find oldest-ever stash of marijuana
1 day ago
OTTAWA — Researchers say they have located the world's oldest stash of marijuana, in a tomb in a remote part of China.
The cache of cannabis is about 2,700 years old and was clearly "cultivated for psychoactive purposes," rather than as fibre for clothing or as food, says a research paper in the Journal of Experimental Botany.
The 789 grams of dried cannabis was buried alongside a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, likely a shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China.
The extremely dry conditions and alkaline soil acted as preservatives, allowing a team of scientists to carefully analyze the stash, which still looked green though it had lost its distinctive odour.
"To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent," says the newly published paper, whose lead author was American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo.
Remnants of cannabis have been found in ancient Egypt and other sites, and the substance has been referred to by authors such as the Greek historian Herodotus. But the tomb stash is the oldest so far that could be thoroughly tested for its properties.
The 18 researchers, most of them based in China, subjected the cannabis to a battery of tests, including carbon dating and genetic analysis. Scientists also tried to germinate 100 of the seeds found in the cache, without success.
The marijuana was found to have a relatively high content of THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis, but the sample was too old to determine a precise percentage.
Researchers also could not determine whether the cannabis was smoked or ingested, as there were no pipes or other clues in the tomb of the shaman, who was about 45 years old.
The large cache was contained in a leather basket and in a wooden bowl, and was likely meant to be used by the shaman in the afterlife.
"This materially is unequivocally cannabis, and no material has previously had this degree of analysis possible," Russo said in an interview from Missoula, Mont.
"It was common practice in burials to provide materials needed for the afterlife. No hemp or seeds were provided for fabric or food. Rather, cannabis as medicine or for visionary purposes was supplied."
The tomb also contained bridles, archery equipment and a harp, confirming the man's high social standing.
Russo is a full-time consultant with GW Pharmaceuticals, which makes Sativex, a cannabis-based medicine approved in Canada for pain linked to multiple sclerosis and cancer.
The company operates a cannabis-testing laboratory at a secret location in southern England to monitor crop quality for producing Sativex, and allowed Russo use of the facility for tests on 11 grams of the tomb cannabis.
Researchers needed about 10 months to cut red tape barring the transfer of the cannabis to England from China, Russo said.
The inter-disciplinary study was published this week by the British-based botany journal, which uses independent reviewers to ensure the accuracy and objectivity of all submitted papers.
The substance has been found in two of the 500 Gushi tombs excavated so far in northwestern China, indicating that cannabis was either restricted for use by a few individuals or was administered as a medicine to others through shamans, Russo said.
"It certainly does indicate that cannabis has been used by man for a variety of purposes for thousands of years."
Russo, who had a neurology practice for 20 years, has previously published studies examining the history of cannabis.
"I hope we can avoid some of the political liabilities of the issue," he said, referring to his latest paper.
The region of China where the tomb is located, Xinjiang, is considered an original source of many cannabis strains worldwide.
Copyright © 2008 The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
The Mummies of Urumchi Make the New York Times!
Great story on one of my favorite subjects: the mummies of Urumchi in the Tarim Basin.
The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn’t Care to Listen To
By EDWARD WONG
Published: November 18, 2008
URUMQI, China — An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government’s unambiguous take on the history of this border region: “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” says one prominent sign.
But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story.
One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese.
The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in the western deserts here over the last few decades. The ancient bodies have become protagonists in a very contemporary political dispute over who should control the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.
The Chinese authorities here face an intermittent separatist movement of nationalist Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim people who number nine million in Xinjiang.
At the heart of the matter lie these questions: Who first settled this inhospitable part of western China? And for how long has the oil-rich region been part of the Chinese empire?
Uighur nationalists have gleaned evidence from the mummies, whose corpses span thousands of years, to support historical claims to the region. Foreign scholars say that at the very least, the Tarim mummies — named after the vast Tarim Basin where they were found — show that Xinjiang has always been a melting pot, a place where people from various corners of Eurasia founded societies and where cultures overlapped.
Contact between peoples was particularly frequent in the heyday of the Silk Road, when camel caravans transported goods that flowed from as far away as the Mediterranean. “It’s historically been a place where cultures have mixed together,” said Yidilisi Abuduresula, 58, a Uighur archaeologist in Xinjiang working on the mummies.
The Tarim mummies seem to indicate that the very first people to settle the area came from the west — down from the steppes of Central Asia and even farther afield — and not from the fertile plains and river valleys of the Chinese interior. The oldest, like the Loulan Beauty, date back 3,800 years.
Some Uighurs have latched on to the fact that the oldest mummies are most likely from the west as evidence that Xinjiang has belonged to the Uighurs throughout history. A modern, nationalistic pop song praising the Loulan Beauty has even become popular.
“The people found in Loulan were Uighur people, according to the materials,” said a Uighur tour guide in the city of Kashgar who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of running afoul of the Chinese authorities. “The nationalities of Xinjiang are very complicated. There have been many since ancient times.”
Scholars generally agree that Uighurs did not migrate to what is now Xinjiang from Central Asia until the 10th century. But, uncomfortably for the Chinese authorities, evidence from the mummies also offers a far more nuanced history of settlement than the official Chinese version.
By that official account, Zhang Qian, a general of the Han dynasty, led a military expedition to Xinjiang in the second century B.C. His presence is often cited by the ethnic Han Chinese when making historical claims to the region.
The mummies show, though, that humans entered the region thousands of years earlier, and almost certainly from the west.
What is indisputable is that the Tarim mummies are among the greatest recent archaeological finds in China, perhaps the world.
Four are in glass display cases in the main museum here in Urumqi, the regional capital. Their skin is parched and blackened from the wear and tear of thousands of years, but their bodies are strikingly intact, preserved by the dry climate of the western desert.
Some foreign scholars say the Chinese government, eager to assert a narrative of longtime Chinese dominance of Xinjiang, is unwilling to face the fact that the mummies provide evidence of heterogeneity throughout the region’s history of human settlement.
As a result, they say, the government has been unwilling to give broad access to foreign scientists to conduct genetic tests on the mummies.
“In terms of advanced scientific research on the mummies, it’s just not happening,” said Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania who has been at the forefront of foreign scholarship of the mummies.
Mr. Mair first spotted one of the mummies, a red-haired corpse called the Cherchen Man, in the back room of a museum in Urumqi while leading a tour of Americans there in 1988, the first year the mummies were put on display.
Since then, he says that he has been obsessed with pinpointing the origins of the mummies, intent on proving a theory dear to him: that the movement of peoples throughout history is far more common than previously thought.
Mr. Mair has assembled various groups of scholars to do research on the mummies. In 1993, the Chinese government tried to prevent Mr. Mair from leaving China with 52 tissue samples after having authorized him to go to Xinjiang and to collect them.
But a Chinese researcher managed to slip a half-dozen vials to Mr. Mair. From those samples, an Italian geneticist concluded in 1995 that at least two of the mummies had a European genetic marker.
The Chinese government in recent years has allowed genetic research on the mummies to be conducted only by Chinese scientists.
Jin Li, a well-known geneticist at Fudan University in Shanghai, tested the mummies in conjunction with a 2007 National Geographic documentary. He concluded that some of the oldest mummies had East Asian and even South Asian markers, though the documentary said further testing needed to be done.
Mr. Mair has disputed any suggestion that the mummies were from East Asia. He believes that East Asian migrants did not appear in the Tarim Basin until much later than the Loulan Beauty and her people.
The oldest mummies, he says, were probably Tocharians, herders who traveled eastward across the Central Asian steppes and whose language belonged to the Indo-European family. A second wave of migrants came from what is now Iran.
The theory that the earliest mummies came from the west of what is now modern China is supported by other scholars as well. A textile expert, Elizabeth Wayland Barber, in a book called “The Mummies of Urumchi,” wrote that the kind of cloth discovered in the oldest grave sites can be traced to the Caucasus.
Han Kangxin, a physical anthropologist, has also concluded that the earliest settlers were not Asians. He has studied the skulls of the mummies, and says that genetic tests can be unreliable.
“It’s very clear that these are of Europoid or Caucasoid origins,” Mr. Han, now retired, said in an interview in his apartment in Beijing.
Of the hundreds of mummies discovered, there are some that are East Asian, but they are not as ancient as the Loulan Beauty or the Cherchen Man.
The most prominent Chinese grave sites were discovered at a place called Astana, believed to be a former military outpost. The findings at the site span the Jin to the Han dynasties, from the third to the 10th centuries.
Further clouding the picture, a mummy from the Lop Nur area, the 2,000-year-old Yingpan Man, was unearthed with artifacts associated with an entirely different part of the globe. He was wearing a hemp death mask with gold foil and a red robe decorated with naked angelic figures and antelopes — all hallmarks of a Hellenistic civilization.
Despite the political issues, excavations of the grave sites are continuing. Mr. Abuduresula, the Uighur archaeologist, made a trip in late September to the desert site at Xiaohe, where 350 graves have been discovered. The bottom layer of graves dates back nearly 4,000 years. More recent graves point to a matriarchal herding society that worshiped cows, Mr. Abuduresula said.
Somewhere in those sands, he said, archaeologists have discovered a woman as striking as the Loulan Beauty. She is called the Xiaohe Princess, and even her eyelashes are intact.
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The Xiaohe Princess? When was she discovered? I don't recall reading about her!
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Frozen Scythian Mummies May Melt Away
Parzinger fears global warming may soon put an end to the search for Scythians. Rudenko’s dig diaries contain reports of weather far colder than what modern archaeologists experience in the Altai. “When you read descriptions from the 1940s and compare them with the climate of today, you don’t need to be a scientist to see there’s been a change,” Parzinger says.
Geographer Frank Lehmkuhl from the University of Aachen in Germany has been studying lake levels in the Altai region for a decade. “According to our research, the glaciers are retreating and the lake levels are rising,” Lehmkuhl says. With no increase in the region’s rainfall, the change “can only come from melting permafrost and glaciers.”
As the permafrost thaws, the ice that has preserved the Scythian mummies for so many centuries will thaw too. In the Olon-Kurin-Gol grave, the ice that once crushed the mummy against the roof of the burial chamber had receded nine inches by the time the chamber was opened. Within a few decades, the ice lenses may be completely gone. “Right now we’re facing a rescue archaeology situation,” Parzinger says. “It’s hard to say how much longer these graves will be there.”
You can read the entire article at Discover Magazine Online:
06.25.2008
Frozen Siberian Mummies Reveal a Lost Civilization
Global warming may finally do in the bodies of the ancient Scythians
By Andrew Curry
Sunday, March 16, 2008
"Female Dancer" Mummy Discovered to Be Son of Ramses the Great
From the Telegraph.co.uk online:Egyptian mummy exhibit is son of Ramesses II
By Lucy Cockcroft
Last Updated: 2:38am GMT 16/03/2008
An Egyptian mummy kept on display in a provincial museum for nearly 80 years has been identified as a son of the powerful pharaoh Ramesses II.
The 3,000-year-old relic was thought to have been a female temple dancer, but a hospital CT scan showed features so reminiscent of the Egyptian royal family that experts are 90 per cent sure it is one of the 110 children Ramesses is thought to have fathered.
Tests showed that the mummy had a pronounced over-bite and misaligned eyes, akin to members of the 19th Dynasty, and his facial measurements were found to be almost identical to those of Ramesses himself.
Experts believe that the mummified man died in his thirties between 1295 and 1186 BC of a wasting disease, likely to be cancer.
Chemical analysis also showed that the body had been embalmed using expensive materials, including pistachio resin and thyme, the preserve of priests and royalty. The story of the royal mummy was uncovered by a team from York University who were filmed carrying out the tests for History Channel series Mummy Forensics.
Gillian Mosely, the producer, said: "When the mummy was taken away for analysis we thought we were looking at a female temple dancer, we certainly didn't expect to make a significant discovery like this. It has been a very exciting and ground-breaking process.
"After conducting a series of tests, including a hospital scan, we are 90 per cent sure he is a son of Ramesses, and other evidence suggests he was probably also a priest."
The identity of the mummy, kept at Bolton Museum, Lancs, has been hidden because hieroglyphics on its sarcophagus suggested that it was a female temple dancer.
Historians now believe his body was placed in this coffin years after his death either by a grave robber who stole the original sarcophagus, or it was hidden by people hoping to protect it from thieves.
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Or this particular son of Ramesses II actually WAS a temple dancer - but after his death it was decided this was too degrading a profession for a royal male, and therefore "he" was designated as a "she" on the outer casing of the mummy. I find this a more likely explanation that that, years after this royal son's death a thief stole a female mummy and put a male royal mummy in her place! For one thing, the two mummies would not have been buried in the same tomb. Duh!
Was the royal mummy placed in the outer casing of a female dancer many many years later out of sheer expediency? I find this an equally unlikely explanation, as the Egyptian priesthood remained intact until at least 400 CE and retained their knowledge of ancient hieroglyphics and embalmbing techniques! They would not have made such a mistake as to put a royal male body inside a female sarcophagus!
The easiest explanation is usually the correct explanation. In this case, that means that the tomb markings on the outer casing were related to the male mummy within it - a temple dancer.
DNA tests would give us further information as far as confirming whether this is, indeed, a son of Pharaoh Ramesses II.
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